Putting a name to it
Subtitle: diagnosis in contemporary society
By: Annemarie Goldstein Jutel ; foreword by Peter Conrad
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Baltimore
Language: eng
Number of pages: 175
ISBN-13: 9781421400679
Subjects: Social aspects; Social medicine; Diagnosis
Description: Over a decade after medical sociologist Phil Brown called for a sociology of diagnosis, this book provides the first book-length, comprehensive framework for this emerging subdiscipline of medical sociology. Diagnosis is central to medicine. It creates social order, explains illness, identifies treatments, and predicts outcomes. Using concepts of medical sociology, Annemarie Goldstein Jutel sheds light on current knowledge about the components of diagnosis to outline how a sociology of diagnosis would function. She situates it within the broader discipline, lays out the directions it should explore, and discusses how the classification of illness and framing of diagnosis relate to social status and order. Jutel explains why this matters not just to doctor-patient relationships but also to the entire medical system. As a result, she argues, the sociological realm of diagnosis encompasses not only the ongoing controversy surrounding revisions to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in psychiatry but also hot-button issues such as genetic screening and pharmaceutical industry disease mongering. Both a challenge and a call to arms, Putting a Name to It is a lucid, persuasive argument for formalizing, professionalizing, and advancing longstanding practice. Jutel's innovative, open approach and engaging arguments will find support among medical sociologists and practitioners and across much of the medical system.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: A place for a sociology of diagnosis?; title: An avenue for understanding; title: Lumping or splitting: classification in medical diagnosis; title: The aims of classification; title: Classification of diseases; title: Classification systems; title: Revealing classificatory politics in diagnosis; title: Social framing and diagnosis: corpulence and fetal death; title: Corpulence; title: Fetal death; title: Frame and be framed; title: What's wrong with me? diagnosis and the patient-doctor relationship; title: Illness and disease; title: Medical authority; title: Changing roles in diagnosis; title: What next?; title: Beyond our ken? contested diagnoses and the medically unexplained; title: Medically unexplained symptoms; title: Discovery of disease; title: Whose diagnosis?; title: Splitting from diagnosis; title: Driving diagnosis: peddlers and pushers; title: Engines of diagnosis; title: Female hypoactive sexual desire disorder; title: Discussion; title: "There is nothing so small as to escape our inquiry": technologies of diagnosis; title: Technology and diagnostic categories; title: Technology and the diagnostic process; title: Screening; title: Hope; title: Conclusion: directions for the sociology of diagnosis.